The Battle of the Bench

Twenty-seven years ago dusty, somnolent little Whitney, Tex. (pop. 2,000) became the recipient of a homely but extremely functional civic improvement: Druggist D. ("Doctor Dee") Scarborough installed a pine bench in the shade outside his store. The bench soon became as integral a part of Whitney's life as the Plaza in Santa Fe or Fountain Square in Cincinnati.

Whiskery old gaffers from all over the Brazos Valley used it as a refuge from the sun and females; comfortably installed on its well-worn planks, they whittled, spat magnificent streams of tobacco juice on the sidewalks, studied the weather and damned the modern world with lordliness and venom.

But in the years after World War II, Whitney itself began to show alarming signs of going modern. Young soldiers came home, got into politics and began to run the town. They put through bond issues for new water and sewer systems, for paving and lighting the streets. Construction of the vast Whitney Dam began on the nearby Brazos River and new people thronged in. A hundred new houses were built.

Whitney's housewives sniffed the spirit of change, suddenly rebelled. After years of submissively sidestepping the bench and its occupants (some of whom had a roving eye and a ribald tongue), a delegation of housewives called on young Mayor Fred Basham and told him to do something about it. The mayor agreed. One morning Whitney's oldtimers discovered, with cackling chagrin, that their sanctuary had been ignominiously lugged into a nearby alley. They angrily drew up a petition asking that it be put back. Cried one: "They done it in the night like a thief--if that bench was a horse we could have them hanged!"

When the town ignored them, they dragged nail kegs to the spot where the bench had originally reposed, and perched on them like defiant octopuses clinging to piling. The chief of police threatened to confiscate the nail kegs. That was more than the old men could take. They demanded, and finally got, a special municipal election to decide whether the bench should be restored.

Whitney's housewives redoubled their cries. Complained 70-year-old Mrs. T. E. Bagley: "They must spit about two or three gallons a day! They ain't died fast enough, these old men!" Tom Rose, 97-year-old dean of the bench sitters, replied with spirit: "Come here in '77 from Tennessee, been married 76 years, and my wife ain't whipped me yet! What do they want us old folks to do--hide in the woods?"

At week's end Whitney came to a decision. By a 2-to-1 majority, the townspeople voted the bench back.

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